So, there’s apparently a bit of a kerfluffle going on right now in the competitive fighting “scene”, as it were, where fans of the Dead or Alive series are concerned that their punching simulator of choice is not taken seriously by, well, anyone.

I can’t fathom why.

Anyway, one of the proposed ways to make other people take DoA5 more seriously as a game and not, you know, as a waifu simulator, is to disallow certain costumes from being used during tournaments.

While I don’t have any stake in either side of the argument, this made me go through the lists of banned and approved costumes, and I fell head-over-heels in love with this one:

And I figured, well, it’s about Y200, I will pay that to beat people up dressed as a witch.

I could not buy this from the PS4 store. Where there would normally be a price, it just said “not buyable”

It had a link to an explanation. When I clicked the link, it said “You can’t buy this, because you can’t buy the following content: Marie Rose Halloween Costume”

…this seemed circular.

I also tried the web store and was met with the same “you can’t buy this”

Finally, I tried the PS3 store, and found that it actually had a price link and that it would let me give them virtual Yen in exchange for virtual clothes and all was well. I was even able to download it when I went back to my PS4!

…and then it wouldn’t show up in the list of costumes, which had me fuming just a touch.

It turned out that, if I downloaded the free-to-play version of DOA5, the costume WOULD show up in the full paid version. I’m not going to try to figure this out, and I’m not going to fuss too much about needing to have two copies of a game installed, but for a game that’s sold at a decreased price with the intent of nickle-and-diming the player to death with DLC, it made it annoyingly hard to get nickled-and-dimed.